This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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When General Gordon went to Jerusalem in 1883, the city offended his evangelical sensibilities. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, filled with incense and superstition, simply would not do: Christ must have died elsewhere. Jerusalem, he thought, possessed the shape of a woman’s body (as ever with Chinese Gordon, one can go wild with Freudian theorising), all of which apparently suggested that another site, just north of the Damascus Gate, was the real Golgotha. 

Jerusalem, for Gordon and many like him, was a place between heaven and earth, a place where every shrub and every rock held a deeper meaning and revealed something divine. 

There are, of course, plenty who visit the traditional holy sites of Jerusalem and find them exhilarating: busloads of Christian pilgrims, down from Galilee for the day to retrace the Stations of the Cross or Jewish boys scribbling down notes to deposit in the cracks in the Western Wall. 

And there are more extreme cases. When Homer Simpson went to Jerusalem, in 2010, he came to believe he was the Messiah (there are also non-fictional cases of this “Jerusalem Syndrome”). But then, farther from heaven and closer to earth, there are those who, like Mark Twain, can’t help but feel disappointed that the city falls so short of its biblical hype. Jerusalem, Twain wrote in 1867, was the “knobbiest town in the world”, “mournful and dreary and lifeless … I would not desire to live here”. 

Neither would I, I thought, when I last found myself there, just over a year ago. Aside from being, like the rest of the Middle East, too hot, dirty and smelly for my taste, Jerusalem is a fidgety, overwrought place. 

In, say, Tel Aviv, one can at least embrace the cognitive dissonance required to live in such a restive, explosive place — and many Israelis do exactly that. But in Jerusalem, subjected to 2,000 years of eschatological fantasies, cleaved in two by the Green Line, proclaimed as capital by two enemy states, crawled over by legions of armed soldiers, such dissonances cannot be indulged in. 

Few places, as every guidebook will tell you, are so steeped in history. Everyone who has ever visited Jerusalem, whether as tourist, pilgrim, conqueror or liberator, knows that. The Viscount Allenby knew that when he entered Jerusalem on 11 December 1917. Every detail of his triumphal procession was carefully designed and choreographed by men who knew their history. Like the Byzantine emperor Heraclius — who was himself imitating Christ, who was himself imitating King David — Allenby dismounted from his horse before entering the city and humbly removed his shoes and shirt. 

Nor was he the only conqueror of Jerusalem to have taken heed of such exemplars: the caliph Umar did so in the seventh century, as did the Crusader Geoffrey de Bouillon. One visitor to the city who hadn’t observed this protocol, incidentally, was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who in 1898 entered through the gates on horseback, in full pomp and ceremony. He was not, thereafter, a man smiled upon by providence.

This vignette about Allenby provides a colourful epilogue to Jodi Magness’ Jerusalem through the Ages, capping off a narrative that otherwise scarcely enters the second millennium. One might suppose that focusing on ancient and medieval Jerusalem is Magness’ way of ducking out of political controversy. 

But not so: our modern controversies about Jerusalem, after all, have ancient and medieval roots, so that it is difficult to find a balanced and unbiased report of Jerusalem’s history that isn’t tainted by contemporary political preoccupations. Difficult but no longer impossible: for that is precisely what Magness has given us. 

It helps that she holds herself to the highest scholarly standards. Firm in her view that “nothing about Jerusalem’s story is boring”, she declares in the introduction that “as specialists, we have a responsibility to share with the public — as objectively as possible — detailed and scientific information about Jerusalem’s history and archaeology”. 

This is a noble dream, and it is admirably realised: Magness’ book is never light on detail, never condescends to its readers and remains generally interesting, if at times demanding to a layman. A certain insecurity hangs over much historical non-fiction nowadays, borne of the desperation to prove the subject’s “relevance”. But many already care — perhaps too much — about Jerusalem, and Magness knows this. 

Magness is an archaeologist, and the book’s arguments all proceed from the archaeological point of view. Other sources about Jerusalem’s early history, including scriptural ones, are occasionally adduced, but only to supplement what we know from archaeological research. Magness, however, often finds in the archaeological record more reason to trust biblical accounts than do many of her colleagues. 

The discovery of an inscription at Tel Dan in 1993, for example, points to the historical existence of David and Solomon. Against arch-sceptics in the archaeological community like Israel Finkelstein, she contends that Jerusalem really was — as the books of Samuel and Kings tell us — the capital city of a petty kingdom in the Judaean Hills.

Magness similarly dismisses Finkelstein’s contention that several books of the Bible were not written in the post-exilic Persian period, but rather much later in the Hasmonean period: recent excavations at the Givati Parking Lot, she informs us, do not rationally permit this theory. 

She even finds an archaeological basis for the deeper anthropological question of why this small settlement evoked such a profound spiritual meaning in the first place. It probably had something to do with the spring on Gihon, to which we can trace the earliest human activity: the gushing forth of water from inside the earth must have struck the first settlers “as a sign that the spring and the hill above were sacred”. 

As well as narrating Jerusalem’s early history, Magness tells the history of archaeological research in the Holy Land, describing the men and women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who went about digging up Jerusalem in search of historical — and sometimes religious — truth. This subject deserves a full study of its own, and three points from Magness’ discussion are worth making explicit. 

First, archaeology in the Holy Land was pioneered by Western imperial adventurers. Second, archaeological research has always had a political flavour. Magness, for example, describes one of her old teachers, Yigal Shiloh, a “stereotypically brash sabra with a lot of machismo”.

Archaeology once had been an Israeli national pastime, and Shiloh and his colleagues could set up shop wherever they wished. But in 1977, the Likud Party under Menachem Begin came to power for the first time — Israelis called this HaMahapakh (“the revolution”) — and suddenly the religious right had the political means with which to object to archaeological excavation. Many haredim thought archaeology in the Holy Land ran counter to religious strictures, since it risked disturbing Jewish graves. When Shiloh died of stomach cancer, aged fifty, this was viewed by some as divine punishment.

This leads us to the third point: that so many of the debates and controversies which Magness describes in the book remain unresolved for contingent and, to my own secular mind, extremely frustrating reasons. It is not the scientific means which we often lack, but political ones. More cheeringly, the book concludes with a guide for a walking tour of Jerusalem, which I will be sure to consult when I am next there. Armed with this book, I think I shall enjoy the city more.